January 13 was College of Arts and Sciences night at the Men's basketball game versus St. Mary's. Did you know five of SCU's six first round NBA draft picks studied in the College of Arts and Sciences? Brandin Podziemski '25, 2023 - Golden State Warriors, Jalen Williams '23, 2022 - Oklahoma City Thunder, Steve Nash '96, 1996 - Phoenix Suns, Ken Sears '55, 1955 - New York Knicks, and Dick O'Keefe '47, 1947 - Washington Capitals.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

I attended the President’s Cabinet Retreat in Santa Cruz this week where we had a chance to interact a lot with Jim Glaser, our newly appointed Executive Vice President and Provost. Jim is an Arts and Sciences guy, so he will arrive on campus with a deep appreciation for all of our departments and programs, yay!

As a reminder, Campus Ministry will be hosting a mass intention for the College of Arts and Sciences during the 8 p.m. mass this Sunday. All faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend and receive a special blessing.

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

Takeshi Moro’s (Art and Art History) Practicing Non-violent Protest, published by Sming Sming Books, entered the collections of the National Gallery of Art Library in Washington, D.C. The zine features impromptu performances by Moro’s daughters between 2016-2020.

Maggie Hunter (Sociology) published an article, "Colorism Research over the Decades," in the journal Research in Human Development. The article engages enduring problematics such as the historical roots of colorism and the role of light-skinned people of color in sustaining colorism. Understanding power dynamics and their role in colorism within and across racial groups is a central piece of the article, followed by an analysis of the evolving role of intersectionality in the field. She describes how the field of colorism is evolving in promising new directions, including colorism and mental health, the politics of color measurement, colorism and the one-drop rule, and the experiences of youth and colorism.

Image credit: Duke University's Center on Law, Race & Policy.

Chad Raphael (Communication) published a co-edited and co-authored open access book, Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice from University of California Press - Luminos. The book shows how community-engaged research makes unique contributions to environmental justice by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing actionable data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities for equity and mutual benefit. Ground Truths offers a critical synthesis of relevant research in many fields, outlines the main steps in conducting this research, evaluates the major research methods used, suggests new directions, and addresses overcoming institutional barriers to this work in academia. The coauthors employ an original framework that shows how community-engaged research and environmental justice align, which links research on the many topics treated in the chapters—from public health, urban planning, and conservation to law and policy, community economic development, and food justice and sovereignty. The book launch includes a webinar series in which the co-authors will present their chapters.

Tripp Strawbridge (Modern Languages and Literatures), with co-authors Javier Muñoz-Basols, Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez, and Laura Acosta Ortega, recently published an article in the journal Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). The article, titled "Interactional patterns in the online language classroom: A quantitative analysis across proficiency levels and lesson types," examines the nature of interaction in a fully online university classroom setting. Data were 18 hours of video recordings of synchronous Spanish language instruction, which were analyzed for the frequency and type of student interaction. Results showed that, while lower-proficiency class groups engaged in interaction more frequently than higher-proficiency groups, opportunities to engage in extended discourse were largely determined by activity type and instructor leadership. This article was published open access.

Virginia Matzek (Environmental Studies and Sciences) appeared on the podcast "The Case for Conservation" in January, answering the question "Should we resurrect extinct species?" Hear some pros and cons of bringing back woolly mammoths to roam the Siberian steppe.

Tom Plante (Psychology) published an article with recent SCU graduate, Chris Buenrostro '23 (Psychology), "A clinical trial of the Examen and Mindfulness meditation within a secular substance use treatment program" in the Journal of Addictions and Offender Counseling.

Abstract: The Examen is a 500-year-old Jesuit introspective prayer and reflection. Recent research has indicated that it has utility in psychotherapy. This study implemented the Examen as a secular cognitive–behavioral tool in the first longitudinal clinical trial of the intervention with an addiction treatment population, comparing it directly to a treatment-as-usual mindfulness intervention. The study found that Examen and mindfulness are equivalent in outcomes on depression, anxiety, stress, and substance craving. Further research should continue to investigate the Examen as an alternative to mindfulness for religious and secular populations and the factors responsible for the success of these practices.

Victor Quiroz (Modern Languages and Literatures) published an article, “Panoramas y Cosmoramas en Simón Rodríguez,” in Modern Languages Notes. This paper examines the visual discourse of Sociedades americanas (1828-1849) by the Venezuelan thinker Simón Rodríguez (Caracas, 1769-Amotape, 1854) in dialogue with visual spectacles like the Panorama, the Mobile Panorama, and the Cosmorama. Quiroz argues that Rodríguez materializes the experience of visual consumption of these massive shows in the text’s form dialectically. In dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss, Quiroz demonstrates how Rodríguez recodifies these shows’ mechanisms of optical illusion to disfigure the illusions that supported the criollo republican project and reveal the colonial face of the Latin American states. This theoretical approach, which explores the connections between technology and literature, significantly reframes the debate about Rodríguez, one of the most radical Latin American thinkers.

Collage of Nine Bessel Functions by Jingxuan (Paisley) Hou on display at the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

The inaugural 2023 Rick Scott Memorial Scholars from the Mathematics and Computer Science Department made a presentation called "The Artistic Potential of the Bessel Functions" at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco on Jan 4, 2024 at 10 am in the session on Mathematics and the Arts. Student scholars included Tong (Ben) Chen '24 (Mathematics), Jingxuan (Paisley) Hou '24 (Computer Science), and Yanni (Rebecca) Zhu (Mathematics), supervised by faculty Frank Farris and Reza Shariatmadari. In addition, Paisley had a piece accepted to the Exhibition of Mathematical Art run by the American Mathematical Society.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar